Comparison of TDNN training algorithms in brain machine interfaces

Linear or non-linear models are used in brain machine interfaces (BIMIs) to map the neural activity to the associated behavior, typically the primate's hand position. Linear models assume a linear relationship between neural activity and hand position that may not be the case. A solution would be time-delay neural network (TDNN) that provides effectively a nonlinear combination of linear models. However, this model results in a drastic increase of free parameters and slow convergence when trained by an error backpropagation learning rule. We propose to train the TDNN by scaled conjugate gradient, which avoids time-consuming linear search, coupled with weight decay to reduce the free parameters number and produce generally faster convergence.